A common tactic that Christians use to dismiss the question “Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?” is to say, “No Christian believes that God is a genie. Prayer doesn’t work that way,” or “The Bible never says that God will answer prayers to heal amputated limbs,” or something similar. But then we find pages like this, straight from the mouth of a devoted Christian:

35 Responses to “Straight from a Christian’s Mouth”

on 26 Apr 2009 at 6:38 pm 1.Lou said …

“everything they need.”

Great job of flagging a key word. Everything that we need. It is amazing what people THINK they need only to discover that they didn’t need as much as they believe. Evidence this: The many thousands upon thousands of amputees who live lives happily without a limb. Admittedly, I cannot relate but I do listen to their testimonies. I have seen it time after time how priorities come in line after such a catastrophic episode.

First of all, thank you for linking back and I’m glad that it has blessed you.

Second, about the question “Why WOn’t God Heal Amputees or any other sickness, incapabilities or diseases at that because God has is God. There are a lot things that we cannot understand because of our finite mind but these things should all the more push us to trust in Him and believe in him that he knows and understands what’s happening and that his mind is infinite. Praise be his name!

on 27 Apr 2009 at 10:16 am 6.Gern Blansten said …

Mikes’ answer just makes me sad. Why are people so willing to believe in supernatural entities without any evidence at all?

on 27 Apr 2009 at 10:56 am 7.Lou said …

Won’t you help this and the many other organizations helping to feed the hungry children? It is a travesty when we live such lives of luxury while others go hungry.

I know what you are thinking. You want Santa so you have NO responsibilities. Sorry, God doesn’t work that way He told us to do it. Read The Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10.

Have a great day and feed a hungry child!

Lou

on 27 Apr 2009 at 12:30 pm 9.Lou said …

That’s just shifting the blame off biblegod, who is willfully allowing children to starve. *or would, if he existed*

The fact is, he could magically resolve it but he won’t. Why? He’s apparently too busy finding your lost car keys, among other trivial christian prayers.

on 27 Apr 2009 at 2:41 pm 10.Snowflake said …

Of course God can’t perform obvious supernatural acts because he must remain hidden. If his existence were obvious, it would interfere with our free will, which is his great gift to us.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’d trade my free will in if it meant I didn’t have to burn in Hell eternally.

My brain will not allow me to just accept something illogical. Therefore I could say I believe in the God of the Bible, or I could say I’ve accepted Jesus as my personal savior, but I can’t actually force myself to MEAN it. I’d just be saying it – and something tells me that when I’m standing tall in front of the man, paying lip service just ain’t gonna cut it.

In other words, my free will has damned me. It doesn’t seem like much of a gift.

on 27 Apr 2009 at 7:33 pm 11.Anonymous said …

God doesn’t “heal” amputees because there is nothing to heal! No one can make you grow extra body parts. The human body simply isn’t capable of that. And as far as no scientific evidence for God’s existence, you are sadly mistaken. There is so much that I can’t possibly list it all here, but let me give you a few examples: the air you and I breathe has just the right amount of oxygen in it- if it was altered at all, you and I could not breathe it, it would be of no use to us, and we would die. And it is self- sustaining, so that no more and no less is produced. No other planet has an atmosphere appropriate for sustaining human life. Another example is the position of the earth: it is in a position that optimizes habitability. Earths location, its size, its structure, its atmosphere, its internal dynamics, and its many intricate cycles that are essential to life(the carbon cycle, the oxygen cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorous cycle, the sulfur cycle, and so on) testify that our planet is exquisitely balanced. It is in its position and has a certain orbit around and distance from the sun for a reason: if we were any closer to the sun, it would be too hot for us to live- any further away, and it would be too cold. If we were any closer to our moon, the tides would completely cover the earth, leaving nothing but water. Now let’s give the human body some thought: the complexity of it is something you could never fathom. The design of DNA is so precise, that if it were even the slightest bit different, it wouldn’t produce the proteins essential to human life. Blood clotting is another really good example: it sounds simple, but it is far from it! If blood didn’t clot in the right place, and in the right amount, and at the right time, you would bleed to death. It involves a highly choreographed cascade of ten steps that use about twenty different molecular components. Without the whole system in place, it doesn’t work. If you make a clot in the wrong place, say in your brain or lung, you’ll die. If you make a clot twenty minutes after all the blood has drained from your body, you’ll die. If the clot isn’t confined to the wound, your entire blood system might solidify, and you’ll die. If the clot doesn’t cover the entire wound, you’ll die. To create a perfectly balanced blood- clotting system, clusters of protein components have to be inserted all at once. There are people who have rare blood disorders, but I am not speaking of them. I could go on, but I would be here for an eternity if I tried to list all the evidence available. Everything I have mentioned discredits your theory, and fits the hypothesis of an intelligent designer. Argue that.

on 27 Apr 2009 at 8:02 pm 12.Gern Blansten said …

Claim CI301:

The cosmos is fine-tuned to permit human life. If any of several fundamental constants were only slightly different, life would be impossible. (This claim is also known as the weak anthropic principle.)
Source:

The claim assumes life in its present form is a given; it applies not to life but to life only as we know it. The same outcome results if life is fine-tuned to the cosmos.

We do not know what fundamental conditions would rule out any possibility of any life. For all we know, there might be intelligent beings in another universe arguing that if fundamental constants were only slightly different, then the absence of free quarks and the extreme weakness of gravity would make life impossible.

Indeed, many examples of fine-tuning are evidence that life is fine-tuned to the cosmos, not vice versa. This is exactly what evolution proposes.

If the universe is fine-tuned for life, why is life such an extremely rare part of it?

Many fine-tuning claims are based on numbers being the “same order of magnitude,” but this phrase gets stretched beyond its original meaning to buttress design arguments; sometimes numbers more than one-thousandfold different are called the same order of magnitude (Klee 2002).

How fine is “fine” anyway? That question can only be answered by a human judgment call, which reduces or removes objective value from the anthropic principle argument.

The fine-tuning claim is weakened by the fact that some physical constants are dependent on others, so the anthropic principle may rest on only a very few initial conditions that are really fundamental (Kane et al. 2000). It is further weakened by the fact that different initial conditions sometimes lead to essentially the same outcomes, as with the initial mass of stars and their formation of heavy metals (Nakamura et al. 1997), or that the tuning may not be very fine, as with the resonance window for helium fusion within the sun (Livio et al. 1989). For all we know, a universe substantially different from ours may be improbable or even impossible.

If part of the universe were not suitable for life, we would not be here to think about it. There is nothing to rule out the possibility of multiple universes, most of which would be unsuitable for life. We happen to find ourselves in one where life is conveniently possible because we cannot very well be anywhere else.

Intelligent design is not a logical conclusion of fine tuning. Fine tuning says nothing about motives or methods, which is how design is defined. (The scarcity of life and multi-billion-year delay in it appearing argue against life being a motive.) Fine-tuning, if it exists, may result from other causes, as yet unknown, or for no reason at all (Drange 2000).

In fact, the anthropic principle is an argument against an omnipotent creator. If God can do anything, he could create life in a universe whose conditions do not allow for it.

on 28 Apr 2009 at 12:16 am 13.Rostam said …

“For all we know, there might be intelligent beings in another universe arguing that if fundamental constants were only slightly different, then the absence of free quarks and the extreme weakness of gravity would make life impossible.”

The tremendous weakness in the argument, which includes faith? For all we know there is not ETs. So why assume there is? It is just a logical, if not more so that God does exists. Facts is, life formed here and the chances of origins forming on chance are astronomical.

“If God can do anything, he could create life in a universe whose conditions do not allow for it.”

What a ridiculously lame argument. At one time, conditions did not allow for it. If He can do anything what He created is quite remarkable.

on 28 Apr 2009 at 12:34 am 14.Anonymous said …

Ok there may be intelligent beings in another universe, but I can guarantee that their bodies aren’t made like ours. I never said there were fundamental conditions that would rule out any life. I said ours. There are several things that, if they were to happen, would eliminate human life on earth. Like a shift in the position of the earth. Or a change in the atmosphere. It is proven fact that we need a certain amount of oxygen and for the earth to be where it is in its exact location in order to thrive. And if your DNA was even slightly different, your body would not make the proteins necessary for your life. Do you really think all of this happens as a result of chance?

Oh, yeah, totally grateful for the master plan that no one seems privvy to, despite it being in the bible.

on 28 Apr 2009 at 1:42 am 16.Amber said …

I am the “anonymous” in numbers 10 and 13. I have to commend Rostam on his argument. What you said about creating life in a universe whose conditions do not allow for it is just lame. Not only do you contradict your statement about life being in another universe, but creating life in a universe whose conditions do not allow for it is impossible to do! He would have to make the conditions allowable for life, just like He did with earth. Your arguments are very weak and you can’t win this. Maybe you will see this when you look God in the eye and he says to you, “Go away from me. I never knew you” and you spend eternity in Hell. I am praying for you.

on 28 Apr 2009 at 10:39 am 17.Gern Blansten said …

Nobody know how life began. You want to credit your god, but that doesn’t mean you’re right. I’m willing to say, “I don’t know.” You aren’t. That makes you dogmatic.

Pray all you want. But if you’re praying for me, please pray to Mordak. He seems like the coolest of all the imaginary gods, yours included.

on 28 Apr 2009 at 10:56 am 18.Lou said …

“That’s just shifting the blame off biblegod, who is willfully allowing children to starve.”

Really Lou? (great name btw) Why, because you believe He should do it YOUR way? A baffling argument. I think Santa and Jeannie and Bewitched are to ingrained in our society. Welfare probably hasn’t helped the mindset either. Give me, do for me and what about me!

What kind of proof is that? That’s only mere opinion, a mass confusion of western thinking. Seems to me, if everyone loved their neighbor as their self, there would be no starving children. Jesus had the right answer.

on 28 Apr 2009 at 11:45 am 19.Gern Blansten said …

Only if Jesus said, “Go, and worship Mordak.”

on 28 Apr 2009 at 12:17 pm 20.Snowflake said …

Amber:

What’s interesting is that you make the jump from arguing for an intelligent designer to mentions of the Christian construct of Hell. What do the two have to do with each other? If the intricacies of the universe are evidence to you that a higher power tuned them, so be it. In fact, I can understand theorizing that the first cause was supernatural, although like Gern I’m most comfortable saying “I don’t know”.

But how does the God of the Bible suddenly drop into this position? Believing the universe was created by a higher power is one thing, but how do you jump all the way down the line to assuming it is the Christian God? There is no more evidence that the Judeo-Christian creation myth is accurate than any other creation myth. Why are you claiming to know more about the First Cause than you possibly can?

Lou:

I happen to agree with you that Jesus was right. If we all loved our neighbors and gave more selflessly, there likely would be no starving people in the world. But how does that entail theism? Was the idea that we should love our neighbor an original one that Jesus devised? Did it require the divine mind of God to come up with such a groundbreaking concept?

Let us not forget that even if every last one of us lived the rest of our lives making the world an altruistic paradise, we would not eliminate suffering. Let’s say we eliminated starvation, torture, and murder. There would still be devastatingly unfair events. Children would die of leukemia. Mothers would be paralyzed in car accidents.

The point is, there are terrible things that occur that are not at the hand of man – they are at the whim of chance. You can blame the fact that children starve on mankind not properly following the philosophy of Jesus if you would like. But what do you blame for the agony of the Ebola virus? What is to blame for the incredible injustice of SIDS? How do these things fit into the same equation with a loving, prayer-answering God?

on 28 Apr 2009 at 3:13 pm 21.Lou said …

“Let’s say we eliminated starvation, torture, and murder. There would still be devastatingly unfair events. Children would die of leukemia. Mothers would be paralyzed in car accidents.”

Of course there would be. Jesus never ever promised that this life would be paradise. For that matter, He never promised it would be fair. He was more concerned with the life to come. The problem is that individuals want to pull a verse from here and there and attempt to build theology or for the matter of making some ridiculous assertion. But, it could be better if His teachings were followed.

Rostem,

You hit the nail directly on the head. Faith comes in many forms does it not…

I agree with Lou, except he’s got the wrong god. Worship Horus instead of Jesus, unless you want to be damned for all eternity. Horus rules.

on 28 Apr 2009 at 4:42 pm 24.Snowflake said …

Lou

Yes, I agree that life could be better if we followed the teachings of Jesus – a good number of them anyway. But, once again, how is theism implied by the directive “Love your neighbor”?

on 28 Apr 2009 at 9:57 pm 25.Lou said …

“But, once again, how is theism implied by the directive “Love your neighbor”?

Snowflake I never claimed that this commandment implies theism. That is another line of reasoning. Theism is justifiable, not necessarily proven with the limited knowledge of mankind. It is all about how one interprets the evidence. For some, I don’t know is plausible. For others, the evidence points to a creator or a designer. I suggest “The language of God” by Francis Collins. From the complexity and design of the cosmos to the cell theism is quite justifiable. Sorry, I’m not much on links. Reading well written books is more my speed. Anything can get loaded on a blog.

on 29 Apr 2009 at 11:32 am 26.Gern Blansten said …

“Theism is justifiable”

But only if you’re worshipping Horus, instead of Jesus—otherwise you are damned for all eternity.

Horus rules.

Horus was born of a virgin.

Horus rose from the dead.

Jesus lovers stole those facts and used them in their silly myth. Con men, all of them.

on 29 Apr 2009 at 12:30 pm 27.Snowflake said …

Lou

Gern’s tactic may be meant to dig, but it has a point. If the creation of the universe is evidence of theism, does it point to a particular god?

on 29 Apr 2009 at 2:12 pm 28.Lou said …

Snowflake,

Once an individual concludes that there must be a omnipotent creator then one must judge the evidence for themselves who that might be. That is what I did 30 years ago.

Jesus honestly saved my life. Guys like C.S. Lewis, C.E.M. Joad, Malcolm Muggeridge all confirmed atheist, bent on disproving the Bible and the God of Abraham all became believers. They found the evidence to be credible. Horus only has Gern and maybe Hermes and anonymous.

Josh McDowell has a great book (another former atheist) called “Evidence that Demands a verdict”. It is a large volume but well worth the time. People amazingly spend little time considering the evidence for such a important decision in their life. A couple links and a blog entry just won’t do it. When they face death, suddenly they desire to search but many times it is too late.

on 29 Apr 2009 at 5:42 pm 29.Lou's other brother said …

“Horus only has Gern and maybe Hermes and anonymous.”

Is it a numbers game? In that case, two billion people are Christian, but four billion are not.

Lou’s other brother, that number should be lower on account most christians are not TrueChristians.(TM)

on 29 Apr 2009 at 7:05 pm 32.Lou's other brother said …

Good point @31.

Also, Lou forgets that there was a time when Horus was widely accepted and worshipped. People moved on to other made-up deities. They’ll likely discard Jesus someday, too, in favor of some other fictionalized man-god.

The miracle that we are going to relate happened well before Renan’s time. It is not a dream, or a fable, but a fact, established with all its circumstances through irrefutable historical evidence. This event categorically refutes Renan’s claim… By a strange anomaly, it remained almost unknown outside of Spain for close to three centuries.

An amazing miracle, but strangely “it remained almost unknown outside of Spain for close to three centuries!” And strangely it has never been repeated. What could it mean? The obvious explanation: it never happened.

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